The researchers looked at 12 years worth of data from the Gallup World Poll, a sample of more than 1.7 million adults from 164 countries. Their goal was to identify points of what they call "income satiation" — or a certain point at which more money does not bring more happiness. The researchers said their findings apply to individuals, and that the ideal income would likely be higher for families or households.

Although $95,000 seems to be the key to overall life satisfaction, your emotional health might be just fine with less money. The study differentiates between "life evaluation," which has to do with long-term goals and social comparisons, and "emotional well-being," which is the emotional quality of your day-to-day life. The price of emotional well-being is a bit cheaper than life evaluation: between $60,000 and $75,000 a year, according to the study.

More money could lead to more problems.

Unfortunately, once you start making more than $95,000, you could actually start becoming less happy than your lower-income peers.

"I think there are many explanations or factors that could be behind it," Andrew T. Jebb, the lead author of the study and a doctoral student at in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Purdue University, told INSIDER. "First, higher income is usually associated with greater time demands, responsibility demands, mental demands. It's not the higher incomes themselves but the costs of them. It is possible that these factors cause one to rate satisfaction with life to be a bit lower. I.e. 'I like my life but wish I could spend more time with family.'"

"Keeping up with the Joneses" may bring added stress to those with higher incomes.Shutterstock

This association between more wealth and an apparent dwindling in happiness could also be explained by the fact that more wealth can also bring higher material aspirations and social comparisons, according to the study, which was published in the journal Nature Human Behavior in January 2018.

"We might speculate that greater levels of income come with additional burdens of 'keeping up' with a certain lifestyle or metaphorically 'the Joneses' that someone who has moderate levels of income does not need to worry as much about," Louis Tay, the senior author of the study and an assistant professor at Purdue, told INSIDER.

The psychologists also analyzed how gender comes into play.

Because the relationship between income and happiness is stronger in men, and because male gender norms in particular stress achievement and social status, the researchers guessed that it might take a higher income for men than women to achieve the same level of satisfaction in their lives.

They found, however, that the average optimal income for women was $100,000 while for men it was $90,000.

Jebb said he didn't read too much into this disparity.

"These were rounded to the nearest $5,000 increment, and given that men exhibit a higher optimal point for positive effect, I think that a simpler explanation is that it's a combination of rounding and sampling error than anything theoretical," he said.

The connection between money and happiness can be seen around the world.

For Jebb, the most fascinating part of the study was seeing the same general trends around the world.

Although the amount of money needed to reach optimal "life evaluation" varied — ranging from $35,000 in Latin America to $125,000 in Australia and New Zealand— the trend of more money equaling more happiness only until a certain point seemed to ring true around the world.

"It's difficult to establish features of human psychology that are worldwide," Jebb said. "This is because it's hard to get the proper data and some things are genuinely culture-specific. But I think there is a strong human nature — even if it gets expressed differently across cultures (the underlying structures are the same). It's always nice to see when that happens (e.g., basic emotions, universal principles of language learning), and this is another case of this. I think it expresses both the importance and also limits of material security and abundance no matter where you live."

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